Interfaith serves youths in transition on the coast

By: PAUL SISSON - Staff Writer | Saturday, January 27, 2007 11:01 PM PST ∞

OCEANSIDE ---- Sometimes helping at-risk kids find a better path means finding the right angle, and that is the idea behind the Transitional Youth Academy.

"We try to figure out all of the different angles to change behaviors," said Lorene Ibbetson, a case worker assigned to the youth academy, which is operated by Interfaith Community Services in its Coastal Services Center on Oceanside Boulevard.

For Andrew Alvarez, the angle is painting.

Sitting on an office chair last week, the tall, thin, 16-year-old mixed acrylic paint in a paper dish, trying to create the perfect shade to complement a Buddha print left for him by one of Interfaith's social workers. A note asked him to paint a border matting for the print that looked cool.

"That's just respect," Alvarez said, as he dabbed swirls of red. "She could have taken it to a frame shop, but she didn't. She asked me to do it."

As he painted, Alvarez said his mother asked him to try the youth academy after he was expelled from Guajome Park Academy in Vista. He said the first meeting with counselors was tense because he "wasn't having a good day."

Rather than watch him walk out the door, Alvarez said someone mentioned that the program had recently purchased a new painting set. Though he had never painted on canvas before, he had always wanted to try.

Alvarez said he had always been turned off by typical youth programs that asked him to sit in a group and talk. As he experimented with painting, Alvarez said he found himself talking in a way that gave him some space.

"I couldn't talk to my mom the way I can talk to them," he said.

Now he has enrolled at the School for Business and Technology in Oceanside. He credited the academy with helping him work through some of the anger he was feeling that led him to get expelled from his last school.

"They didn't give you the answers; they made you find them on your own." he said. "They help me to see a future for my life."

Right site, right time

The Transitional Youth Academy is Interfaith's first foray into working one-on-one with at-risk youths between the ages of 15 and 21. The program is open to youths in Carlsbad, Oceanside and Vista.

"It's a matter of providing services that aren't squared in a box," Ibbetson said.

Escondido-based Interfaith has long been known for its holistic approach to helping the homeless.

Volunteer case workers are assigned to each client who walks through Interfaith's doors. Clients are offered services tailored to their specific needs. Besides food and temporary shelter, Interfaith connects adult clients with drug and alcohol treatment, job training, veteran services and other resources offered by other organizations.

Ibbetson said that Interfaith chose Oceanside as the location for its one-on-one youth counseling because the city has the highest documented number of gang members per capita in the county. Police officials have said that half of the 24 documented gangs in the county operate in Oceanside.

"This is where there seems to be the biggest problem today," she said, noting that two teen gang members have been charged in the Dec. 20 fatal shooting of Oceanside police Officer Dan Bessant.

The Transitional Youth Academy celebrated its one-year anniversary Oct. 31, 2006. The program is funded entirely by private donations, with three full-time case workers and four or five volunteers who develop individual action plans for each teen served.

In addition to one-on-one counseling, the academy offers academic training to help its clients earn their high school diplomas, career assessments, a paid apprenticeship program, placement in various trades, financial literacy training, anger management counseling, and gang prevention and intervention.

According to records kept by case workers, the academy assessed 110 youths ages 15 to 21 in its first full year of operation. Sixty-five have received behavioral health counseling and 55 have remained free of incarceration since enrolling.

About 15 percent of the academy's referrals in its first full year of operation came from North County courts, one-third came from foster homes and a quarter were self-referrals.

Ibbetson said the program tries to catch youths who do not fit into other existing programs already operating in coastal North County. The academy partners with a range of local organizations, and actively sends those other programs its own clients whenever it does not have the necessary services in-house.

"There are a lot of good programs out there that are already operating, and we are not trying to duplicate anything that already works," she said.

Ironically, Andrew Alvarez's mother, Priscilla Alvarez, operates one of those other programs, a nonprofit social work group called From the Inside Out, which is actively involved in working with youth and inmates to fight gangs in local schools.

As someone who works with at-risk youths every day, Priscilla Alvarez said she finds it strange to send her son to the academy. But she said that her family has gone through some rough times recently, and added that she too has found solace talking to Interfaith counselors.

"These are people that I have learned to trust," she said. "This particular facility has really done a lot, not just for Andrew, but for me."

The academy makes heavy use of volunteers, many of whom are working toward degrees in social work.

Leigh Quijada and Laurie Orr are both students working toward their master's degrees at Cal State Long Beach, and they put in credit hours as counselors with the program.

Orr said she has worked with some clients whose parents are gang members, making her job more difficult.

"When you've got family members in gangs, it's kind of difficult to convince the kids to do something different," Orr said. "It's just kind of embedded."

Quijada added that changing a pattern of gang activity in a teenager often takes means a dozen little things, such as helping fill out a job application without using the block lettering gang members often use to communicate.

"We are here for positive reinforcement, too, because they're not getting that at home," Quijada said.

Contact staff writer Paul Sisson at (760) 901-4087 or psisson@nctimes.com.

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